earth

Internet service provider EarthLink said Tuesday that it would lay off approximately 900 employees as the company restructures in an attempt to boost its sagging stock price.

EarthLink will lose about half its staff in the restructuring as it shuts down operations in Orlando, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Harrisburg, Pa., and San Francisco. It will also substantially reduce its presence in Pasadena, Calif., and Atlanta, the company said in a press release Tuesday.

The reductions are expected to cost the company $60 million to $70 million. But it will save EarthLink $25 million to $35 million through the remainder of 2007, … Read more

Google just launched a new version of Google Earth (news, download) from which you gaze up from the surface of the planet, not just down on it. It's a good way to see which stars and planets are over your home, right now. You can also check out a rich database of Hubble Space Telescope images that is overlaid on the celestial map.

The new Google Earth has a lot of additional education and reference material linked to it, pulled in from the Net as needed. The program is a great way to learn about the night sky. It … Read more

I love photos and I love maps. So geotagging--labeling of photos with geographic metadata--is a technology that was tailor-made for me. I'm starting to look into the issue for a feature I'm writing.

But from my early testing so far, it's clear geotagging is nascent at best. Cameras don't support it, geotags generally have to be manually added to photo metadata, and the software to automate it a bit feels kludgy to me. Five years from now my camera will probably have a GPS receiver built in, or at least a port to add one easily, … Read more

Google has acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high-resolution cameras and uses them to take aerial photographs.

The search engine giant announced the move Friday on its LatLong blog about Google Earth and its other mapping efforts. It didn't disclose terms of the deal.

"We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road," Product Manager Stephen Chau said on the blog. "Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or … Read more

Google Earth users now have a really neat layer to play with, straight from the folks at NASA. It comes in the form of new astronaut photography, satellite imagery, and a mode called "Earth City Lights," which shows the entire globe at night. The real standout, however, is the selection of shots from space. Many of these were taken at interesting times on the Earth's landscape like volcanic eruptions, massive forest fires, dust storms, or the unusually thick ice on Lake Michigan during the winter of 2003. Each shot can be blown up and comes with a … Read more

Ever since the first time I saw Lt. Frank Bullitt thrash his Ford Shelby GT around San Francisco, I have longed for a chance to drive the streets of this city unhindered by traffic restrictions, pedestrians, and other such annoyances. Thanks to a Microsoft application, my dream has virtually come true. The Virtual Earth Local Technology Preview makes use of streetside-view photographs similar to those used by Google's Street View application.

With the Microsoft service you get the added bonus of navigating the maps in either a yellow race car or a blue sports car. Drivers get a view … Read more

"Google Maps is changing the way we see the world," journalist Evan Ratliff declares in a June article for Wired magazine. I couldn't agree more. Google's universal mapping project isn't just changing the portals for viewing the world online, it's also changing offline understandings of how the world is best viewed--from Google's services, of course. Google has gained influence fast, by ambitiously developing innovative, interactive mapping software; integrating multiple online services into the majority of desktop and online apps; and familiarizing users with a particular Google-branded aesthetic.

In creating a suite of map apps to encourage users to contribute to Google's greater project and personalize locally-stored versions of a map, Google is not just bringing cartography to the masses, Ratliff points out, but is getting users to help build out its universe. This, of course, makes complete sense. With Google Earth, Google SketchUp, and MyMaps (watch the CNET News.com "how-to" video,) Google's mapping software has surpassed competitors like NASA in digitizing the world. In so doing, Google has captivated the imagination of loyal users who will return to the company's Earth and maps programs to find business listings, explore culturally significant architecture, and plant personal photos and videos.… Read more

Next Sunday, Prince fans in the United Kingdom will be able to get a new 10-song CD, Planet Earth, simply by buying a newspaper.

The Mail on Sunday has bundled CDs several times before, and they usually have sold about 2.5 million papers with these promotions. By way of comparison, the top-selling album this year reached sales of only 1.7 million copies in the U.S. as of July 4. So this is a no-brainer for Prince: he immediately gets his music into the hands of 2.5 million people, some of whom might then buy concert tickets, … Read more

MSN Video, Microsoft's free online video service, first launched in early 2004. Although MSN's ad sales folks tell me that the service has been popular among advertisers--MSN claims that advertisers have actually been clamoring for more inventory than MSN's been able to provide--the service missed the boat when it came to the video-posting and sharing revolution, allowing YouTube to garner a huge lead. It's also missed out on some big events, notably last summer's Live8 concerts, which were Webcast by AOL. MTV did such a poor job with the TV broadcast, overloading the show with … Read more